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A Musical Journey To Repair And Invest In Black Communities Across America

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Today marks Juneteenth, a celebration of the end of slavery in the United States. Just two days ago, President Biden signed into law a resolution that passed with unanimous bipartisan support in the senate, declaring Juneteenth a federal holiday. But to truly repair slavery’s legacy and the damage that has been done—and is still being done—to Black communities across the nation, it is clear that much more is needed.

Even from a purely economic perspective, significant disparities remain: recent data shows that the net worth of an average Black American family is nearly ten times less than that of an average white American family. In “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century,” economist William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen assess the economic and other tolls of slavery and its aftermath and put forth a powerful case for reparations—including significant payments to documented descendants of slaves—to remedy these injustices.

One musician is using his platform as an artist to amplify the call for reparations, embarking upon a journey of discovery across America to uncover what is needed to repair Black communities in this country. Tesfa Wondemagegnehu, a Black sought-after choral conductor on faculty at St. Olaf College, has been leading critical discussions and musical experiences in the choral field around race for years.

Wondemagegnehu is a Co-Founder of the Justice Choir movement, mobilizing musical resistance across the country and seeking in his leadership to broaden understanding of Black music of struggle among white singers, such as in this teaching video of the iconic “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

Even in his non-professional life, he has been using his skills as a pit master to raise thousands of dollars for racial justice organizations from his neighbors in Northfield, Minnesota through Black Folk Barbecue. But a recent conversation pushed him to do more for racial justice.

Turning the microphone around

Friends were supportive of Wondemagegnehu’s advocacy, but noted that he was not close enough to the ground to speak to the universe of Black American realities that he was often called upon to represent. As one friend told him, “You have the microphone. So all of a sudden people are coming to you looking for the answers to these problems that you don't have a solution for, because you're not in the trenches, you don't know what's going on. You think you know, you lived in the hood once upon a time, but you don't know. What happens if you take that microphone that you've had for so long and turn it the other direction and amplify other folks who are actually doing the work?”

“That critique was real,” Wondemagegnehu acknowledged. “I felt it. I needed that critique.” So he set off on a journey to visit Black communities in forty different cities, from Minneapolis to Memphis. This musical-social project, “To Repair,” is an effort to listen to and lift up the voices of those working on the ground to transform Black communities across America—and help them to get the resources they need.

Wondemagegnehu had received a musical commission from Mark Stover of the University of Michigan’s Men’s Glee Club to create a new multi-movement choral work for their coming season. He is using the opportunity as a jumping-off point to do much more, giving his microphone to organizations that, as he described, “are out there killing it every day, in the trenches, working their asses off, not doing it for money, not doing it for recognition, doing it because it needs to be done.” He aims to lift up their voices musically through his forthcoming composition—but is also working with a team of Black creatives to build an online platform that can direct others to support and do business with these Black activists and business-owners who are doing that repair work in their own communities.

Additionally, Wondemagegnehu intends to redistribute the money from his commission to the team who will collaborate with him on the online platform, in the spirit of the mutual aid efforts that he has encountered in his journey so far. “Some economists have been debating this, but even if it's not exactly right, it's still a problem: the dollar circulates in the Asian community twenty-eight days, nineteen days in the Jewish community, seventeen days in a white community, six hours in the Black community. We have to circulate the money in our community and we have to model that behavior that I came across doing planning for this trip.”

Spirituals and police brutality

Wondemagegnehu has been on the road for nineteen days, out of a sixty-day trip. His travels have brought him, almost in pilgrimage, to sites where Black Americans have been killed by the police. These locations, he noted, are largely unmemorialized, but the experiences he has had there have forever changed him and the music he has set out to write.

He recounted his experience in Kenosha, Wisconsin: “What I thought about when I parked my car was how Jacob Blake had three sons in the car, and the troubles that those young boys saw watching their father be shot.” He then began, slowly, reverently, to hum the melody of the spiritual, “Nobody knows the troubles I’ve seen,” in a clear statement of how little the country has changed since the song was sung by slaves. “One of the things I want to do [in my composition] is take short excerpts of certain spiritual motifs that came to me basically sitting right there thinking about those words and those boys sitting in Jacob Blake's car.”

Wondemagegnehu shared a similar story of his time in Baltimore, where he visited the site Korryn Gaines’ killing by police, in plain sight of her five-year old son. He described the dialogue between the two of them, as captured on video: “‘They tryin’ to kill us,’ [the young boy] says. ‘Do you want to go out there?’ his mother replies. ‘No,’ he says.” “The boy's five, but now on top of the trauma of that situation, he was shot and his mother was killed. So now he is a motherless child.” Wondemagegnehu paused, and began to hum the haunting refrain of another too-relevant spiritual, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.” He wondered, “so how do excerpts of those melodies work to create new melodic material, new harmonic material?” That weaving together is just part of Wondemagegnehu’s mission.

Breaking bread

As a pit master, one of Wondemagegnehu’s other goals on his journey has been to eat at, and draw attention to, Black-owned restaurants around the country. He described the shock of many Black restauranteurs when he pulls out his cell phone filming equipment and begins extolling their food: “People are shocked, but they're like, ‘Wait, this is like—I don't understand. What’s the catch?’ It's always a catch. It's like, no, I don't want free food, that's another thing. I want to pay. I want to actually pay you for your food. This is what you do. It's amazing.”

In fact, Wondemagegnehu and I had much of our conversation at a Black-owned restaurant in Washington, DC’s Shaw neighborhood called Fish Scale. We took a break from our discussion to review the fish burgers and interview Director of Operations Kristal Williams:

“Being with my people”

One of the biggest takeaways for Wondemagegnehu has been simply the joy of being in community. Wherever he goes, he asks Black passers-by, “What do you think we need to repair Black communities in America?” After our dinner together at Tsehay, another Black-owned restaurant in DC, a middle-aged gentleman responded, “Money. And love.” This second missing element reflected one of the patterns Wondemagegnehu has already begun to see in Black communities across the country: that community members lament that there isn’t “love in the streets” like there used to be; that people don’t care for each other like they used to.

Reconnecting with community through this experience has been deeply healing for Wondemagegnehu. “There is something, at least so far, that I feel; a safety, a calmness that I feel around my people...Man, I'm hungry for it.”

But this connection has taken work: “At first it was transactional. It was awkward,” Wondemagegnehu admitted, as sharing stories of fumbling with camera equipment and microphones while trying to capture moments with strangers. “What I recognized during the journey is like, ‘Bro, you still busy trying to collect content? Or are you listening to be present for these stories?’” The change in approach was transformative, and opened up unanticipated channels for deep connection at a moment’s notice.

Wondemagegnehu hopes to pay this learning forward not only through the “To Repair” project, but also in his family life: “There's a lot of shit out there happening that shouldn't be happening to our Black babies, and it is sad because here I am in this position, the father of a biracial Black girl, half white half Black. And I know for a fact, based on just how privileged I am, that her life is going to be a lot different than a lot of her kinfolk out there that she'll never meet. But I hope she does meet them. I really do. I really hope that I can be a better parent and make sure she is exposed to her Black side.”

Leveraging musical systems for change

When looking at the end-game for the “To Repair” project, Wondemagegnehu noted that there are more than 54 million Americans who sing in choirs across the country. When these choirs go on tour, he hopes that “To Repair” can provide not only musical inspiration but also serve as an economic engine for Black communities in the cities these choirs visit, as a source of collaborations, business, and support for Black choirs, restaurants, and grassroots organizations around the country for years to come.

Zooming out, Wondemagegnehu is simultaneously realistic and optimistic: “Do I believe that this project is going to spur on a robust dialog on reparations? Absolutely not. Do I think a robust dialog on reparations should happen? Absolutely. But do I think that this can be a way to make the soil more fertile 20 years from now when this country is actually serious about paying the debt that they owe? That would be something that would be really, really exciting.”

You can follow the “To Repair” Project on Facebook and Instagram.

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